Butterfly Friends—the world's most effective small aid organization?

I made that remark while out with two friends this week. As usual, the conversation started with my work in Africa. Many men always have a hard time taking me completely seriously when I claim that women are the world’s most important untapped resource and that it’s a disaster for life on Earth when men ignore the opposite sex.

From there, I told my friends about Butterfly Friends and the soccer academy for schoolgirls, which was designed to give vulnerable and at-risk girls in Africa greater self-confidence because soccer enjoys extremely high status on that continent.

But what ultimately piqued my friends’ curiosity was the fact that this tiny organization in Vikersund, through loyal supporters and sponsors, gave 2,000 children the opportunity to attend school every year!

One of my friends, who was a teacher herself, thought that such a huge number of students must require a large and costly administrative staff. At her school alone, with fewer than two hundred students, there were—in addition to a large number of teachers—at least six people involved in the school’s operations, all working full-time.

When I explained that Butterfly Friends was essentially run by a single person—albeit supported by a small management team at each of the six schools—she concluded that Butterfly Friends must, in that case, be the most efficient volunteer aid organization in history.

I’ve believed this for a long time, and when I got home from the library, I couldn’t resist doing a different calculation: namely, how many local schools in Modum it would take to accommodate a number of students equivalent to that of the Butterfly Friends schools in Gambia.

Below is the list (note: the figures are taken from the internet and have not been verified)

Sysle Elementary School – 160 students and 35 staff members.

Buskerud Elementary School – 153 students and 37 staff members.

Vikersund Elementary School – 309 students and 68 staff members

Enger Elementary School – 230 students and 52 staff members

Stalsberg Elementary School – 250 students and 42 staff members

Nordre Modum Middle School – 244 students and 36 staff members

Søndre Modum Middle School – 218 students and 30 staff members

Adding these up, we get 1,564 students and 320 staff members, of whom the number of administrators is likely somewhere between 50 and 70.

If we head down to the sunny coast and include Nøtterøy High School with 600 students and 90 staff members, the total number of students finally reaches the same level as in The Gambia.

That means we’re possibly talking about a hundred people working full-time to administer two thousand students at Norwegian schools.

In The Gambia, on the other hand, one dedicated individual from Vikersund does most of the work alone, while the quality of education is impressively high. That deserves respect.

Oh, one more thing: while the roads between Sysle, Enger, and Stalsberg are presumably fairly good to drive on, the roads between the Butterfly Friends schools in The Gambia are a nightmare of heavy traffic, bumps, potholes, and mud that drain the energy from even the most enthusiastic person.

Despite that, I agree that Butterfly Friends is the world’s most effective small aid organization!

Written by Arne Johan Furseth, journalist